Ask a Therapist - Supporting Without Overstepping

(gentle music) This question is from Patrice and the question is on how we support team members dealing with mental health challenges at work. I really want to be a supportive leader for my team, especially when it comes to mental health challenges like depression. But sometimes it's hard to tell when someone is struggling, and I don't wanna overstep or make things worse. How can I recognize that someone on my team might be dealing with this? What's the best way to support them without making them uncomfortable? That is a great question, Patrice, and you won't always know. It starts with the relationship that you have with your team members. Such a large part of leadership is building relationship, and building relationship means to be in relation with one another, commune with one another. And that allows us to have conversations, have one-to-ones, be curious, and build trust. With that trust, you can then say, hey, I'm noticing, dot, dot, dot, whatever you might be noticing with this person. And because you have built a relationship with them, that creates a doorway to conversation. Yes, there are times where a person may not like to be called out or feel called out, but because you have created a trusting relationship with them, there is also an opportunity for reconciliation or healing or clearing up any misunderstandings. The important part is showing your heart by being curious, giving them the opportunity to share with you what they may be experiencing. I don't think that there is a possibility of overstepping when you've built a relationship with someone. Overstepping comes from bringing up something to someone you have no relationship with or that you have never had a conversation with them about things that might make them feel vulnerable or things about their life outside of work. If you've never had any of these conversations with a person, it is wild for you to go ask them if they're depressed. I would start by building relationship with your team members. If today is the first time where you're hearing this, and you're like, oh, never did that before, that's okay. Start today. Start today by inviting them in and being open yourself and saying, hey, I know we haven't always had like conversations that weren't about work, but I wanna change that for us. So I'm gonna be introducing some new things that may be like some fun openers or just so that we can start to get to know more about each other. We're gonna do it slowly, but I want y'all to know more about me. I wanna know more about y'all. And also I apologize, like we should have been having this type of relationship in our team. So let's start it now. We'll start talking about it in our one-to-ones. I wanna know what y'all think about it 'cause y'all might be like, I don't wanna know you like that Tom, and that's perfectly fine, but...